Difficult Fruit

​The Lauren K. Alleyne Difficult Fruit Poetry Prize.

​The Winning Poems

2017 Wheeler Light

My Father

I am fishing for your name to remember you gave me mine. How our mouths make the same lures of sentences. How we wait for others to apologize. My father,don’t you remember forcing shame down my becoming-- did I not, like someone who wanted to make their father proud, hang myself by the fine silk of your every wish? Did I not rip? You gave the silverfish nipping our toes-- spoon feeding me dinner. You spoke about how I would one day feed you if I could swallow my tongue. How I want to accept the apology which floats between us butI remember too that sunset burning at the edge of this lake consumed my childhood—it reminds me I was your son and you were the sky, distant yet visible. How growing up I was easily sunburned. You told me howI could do anything one day, I might even stop acting like a faggot. And I never did but you began looking at me the way I looked at fish, something to catch and release but not eat. The wound of my shut mouth is healing. Swimming, I could be miserablebut I chose wading in the bottom of the sea. I could have bitten the bait of resentment and not let you speak to me. My father, how you have morphed from leech to algae. How I could not grow without memory. How I will remember what I don’t want to. I rememberfishing with you.

Honorable Mention 2017

2016 Lynne Burnett

An anniversary gift, her first time doing itLenami Godinez-Avila, 27, hugged the pilotfrom behind as instructed, ran with himawkwardly to the edge and steppedinto the wind-tug beyond anyone’s reach--

her harness not clipped on. She felllike Icarus a thousand feet, meltingfrom sight with the pilot’s shoes into a sea of limbs webbed with leavesdown, down to the forest floor.

Her boyfriend, filming it,stopped. Love screamedthrough the air as he ran downMt. Woodside to find her.Until he did, there was hope.

The pilot glided back to an openmouthed crowd, to his twelveyear old daughter watching,and swallowed the memorycard onboard. His fiftieth birthday.

Who hasn’t known each of themin dreams?--where we fall withoutfalling, see what can’t be happening,get to creatively escape a bad scene.And wake relieved, our lives still​hanging by a thread of assumptions.​

Honorable Mention 2016

2015 Elizabeth Hoover

Won’t You Be My Valentine

By now you are just the space my lover touches me around, his care unwittingly conjuring you. You left an opening to talk to me—your voice speckles through—but I miss you when I feel unknowable, a tongue too swollen to tell. My body is a dream I once had of freedom, a foreign thing that eats silver and loves spiders. How can I tell my lover of my craving for metal, how will he understand the watchful eye of the spider. I long for you— my only witness—no one else knows me in that particular crisis. Not even me. Only you can tell me what my face becomes, which animal I sound like, only you can embroider the scene—the doe gutted or the doe leaping away.​Elizabeth Hoover, 2015 Lauren K. Alleyne Difficult Fruit Poetry Prize